Minnesotans Just Won a Huge Court Victory Against ICE |
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Last week, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order requiring Immigration and Customs Enforcement to allow reasonable time for detainees at the Whipple detention center in Minneapolis to access legal counsel. In a 41-page decision, Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge Nancy Brasel excoriated the government for policies and practices that “all but extinguish” a detainee’s right to counsel. On this week’s Amicus podcast, Dahlia Lithwick spoke to professor Linus Chan, the James H. Binger Clinical Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota and the faculty director of the Detainee Rights Clinic, where he represents people who are being detained by ICE or in danger of being detained by ICE.
Dahlia Lithwick: The Justice Department will likely appeal this order, but in the meantime, how much of a difference will this make for folks swept up by ICE in Minnesota, assuming they get 72 hours before being removed to Texas, per the new order? What kind of a difference will this make for clients like yours?
Linus Chan: It’s going to be a huge difference. But also, it’s just returning things to the status quo. And I will be frank, it’s not as if the status quo was a paragon of attorney access, but at the same time, there had always been an operative norm that detainees should be able to talk to their lawyers and not suddenly be transported out of state with no ability to let their loved ones know what’s going on, and even themselves maybe not knowing what’s going on. So this is really important.
Under the old processes, they would get detained, and then they would go through what’s called processing—they might have their biometrics done, there might be an interview with an officer to confirm information that they have in the system, and after that conversation, they would then be put in a holding area for a few hours, and then put into one of the county jails in Minnesota. Most of the time the person’s stay for detention would be either in Minnesota or around the Midwest.
One of the big departures in current practice from what it was in the past was that ICE’s logistical acumen has reached the point of arresting someone at, let’s say, 9:00 in the morning and having them on a plane by noon. It was working like clockwork. People were not going through that longer process I described. They were going very, very quickly, and they could find themselves suddenly in El Paso or New Mexico, most often in Texas because the detention capacity in Texas has grown a lot.
Now, let’s assume this is a client of yours. Even if you knew they were at the Bishop Whipple building, there was no easy way to contact them. If you went online to the detainee locator, a lot of the time it would say the person is in custody, but it would not tell you where they were. It would direct you to call ICE at this number. Of course I’ve done this, I’ve called the number, and nobody ever........